Billions of users are viewing high resolution screens of their mobile devices and personal computers (desktops and laptops) on a daily basis. Increasing information capacity of contemporary displays has become a mainstream lifestyle factor; it causes widespread changes in the ways people view and process information and has broad implications for the design of user interfaces by software and hardware vendors.
A two-dimensional user interface, where information snippets are arranged into a two-dimensional array on a pane, a page or a desktop, has become a ubiquitous key to productivity for popular operating systems. Snippets may include document thumbnails and icons, file and application icons, action buttons and other visual objects. With the advancement of graphical quality of such visualization, this usage and information access metaphor becomes increasingly intuitive and representative of the data and software accessed by a user.
Growing streams of diversified business and personal information bring to life powerful memorizing tools and services such as the Evernote Service and software developed by the Evernote Corporation of Redwood City, Calif. There are also cloud based file exchange services, including Dropbox, Box.net, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Amazon S3, and many other products and solutions. Combinations of local, device centric and cloud based storage greatly increase information capacities available to individuals and organizations. Once such information volumes reach a certain critical mass, additional data structuring and organization may be required to facilitate comprehension and processing.
Among numerous types of data organization, two popular logical methods are a container approach and a tagging approach. Under the container approach, a hierarchy of containers (also known as folders, directories, binders, portfolios, etc.) is designed to uniquely keep each item (information unit, such as a file, document, image, etc.) in a smallest container within a set of containers, partially ordered by inclusion of the containers. An ordered subset of container names, starting with a largest container that is not a sub-container of another container, where each subsequent container is included into a previous one and where the last of the containers contains the desired item, is known as a full path to the item. A tag approach (tags may be synonymously called labels, identifiers, tabs, codes, marks, etc.) does not require a unique categorization of information units and may not represent a hierarchy, such as in the case of plain tags. Container and tag based organization methods may be combined in some software applications, for example, in the Evernote data organization, or in certain database, search and email systems. Each of the methods provides a distinct way of visualization.
Simple and intuitive visualization methods for container hierarchies, such as folder trees in file systems, notes and notebooks in content management systems and other hierarchical data in various applications, represent important components of seamless information access. One prominent visual metaphor adopted in diverse operating systems and software applications may represent a container hierarchy as a two-pane viewer: the first pane may be a one-dimensional list of containers and another pane may be an adjacent one or two-dimensional viewing pane (a gallery). Sometimes, the container hierarchy list may have a vertical line-by-line item arrangement where different container levels are indicated by offsets of names of the containers. Containers that include other containers may be marked, for example, by triangles preceding names of the containers. Some or all containers may be partially or fully expanded in a hierarchy list. However, only one container may be expanded (opened) in the gallery pane at any given time. In other words, only information units (files, notes, documents, etc.) from one particular container may be simultaneously viewed within an intuitive matrix, represented by content snippets or file type icons. When a user needs to view items from another container, the user has to navigate within the hierarchy list and expand a new container to replace a previously opened container.
A limitation on displaying folder contents may significantly restricts data access efficiency; unfortunately, the restriction may not be cured by various file tree mapping techniques, such as a slice-and-dice method and other mapping approaches.
Accordingly, it is desirable to develop a two-dimensional information flow for container hierarchies to allow simultaneous access to information units in multiple containers.